Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 11919
apmd does not work
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:55 EDT
apmd does not work on IBM Thinkpad 385D with 2.2.15 kernel; it reports incorrect AC/Battery status. This is what it says with the AC cord plugged into an outlet. It says the same thing if I unplug the cord from the wall socket. I've tried building the latest Rawhide apmd from src rpm but it's still broken. $ rpm -qa|grep apmd apmd-3.0final-3 $ apm -v APM BIOS 1.2 (kernel driver 1.12) AC off-line, battery status high: 80% This model of Thinkpad is limited in that it shows only 10%, 80% or 100% battery capacity. Under RedHat 5.2, apm worked ok correctly showing AC or Battery status. 'shutdown -h 0' does power the machine off though.
This seems to be a kernel issue rather than an apmd issue (apmd does little more than querying the values reported by the kernel). Does /proc/apm have the correct value? Does it work with a different OS or version right now (might be a bug in an updated BIOS etc)?
This is what apm currently reports: $ cat /proc/apm 1.12 1.2 0x03 0x01 0x00 0x01 100% -1 ? $ apm -v APM BIOS 1.2 (kernel driver 1.12) AC on-line, battery status high: 100% The problem I have is that it still reports "AC on-line" even if I pull the plug from the wall. I left the machine unplugged until the battery was almost empty, and apm still reported "AC on-line". I think the BIOS is ok because it worked fine under RedHat 5.2 with 2.0.38 kernel. Also the BIOS does blink the battery LED and beeps when the machine is about out of juice; this still happens under RedHat 6.2 and 2.2.15 kernel but apm doesn't seem to know about it. If I start out on AC, boot up, 'apm -v' shows I'm on AC. I then pull the plug, 'apm -v' still shows on AC. If I then reboot, as the machine is booting, and apm starts it shows on-battery. It would appear that apm is only reading the power status after a reboot. I've tried stopping and restarting apmd via init scripts but that doesn't seem to work. Only after a reboot does it appear to know what the current state is.
apmd seems to be working now. Here's what I did: downloaded the latest src.rpm from rawhide and compiled _on_the_laptop. I normally do my compiles on another machine (desktop) and then just install the binary rpms. In this case, the other machine does not have apm support in the kernel so, eventhough the binary rpm builds ok, it doesn't work on my laptop. Not sure why the original rpm that came with 6.2 distribution didn't work.
p.s. I still use xapm and would like it left in the rpm; I know you're trying to get rid of fvwm 1, but it's probably the smallest memory footprint of the window managers out there. I've been using it since RedHat 3.03 and swear by it.